The wish grew up with me;but there were no good drawing-teachers in those days,and if there had been,the cost of instruction would have been beyond the family means.My sister Emilie,however,who saw my taste and shared it herself,did her best to assist me,furnishing me with pencil and paper and paint-box.
If I could only make a rose bloom on paper,I thought I should be happy!or if I could at last succeed in drawing the outline of winter-stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky,it seemed to me that I should be willing to spend years in trying.I did try a little,and very often.Jack Frost was my most inspiring teacher.His sketches on the bedroom window-pane in cold mornings were my ideal studies of Swiss scenery,crags and peaks and chalets and fir-trees,--and graceful tracery of ferns,like those that grew in the woods where we went huckleberrying,all blended together by his touch of enchantment.I wondered whether human fingers ever succeeded in imitating that lovely work.
The taste has followed me all my life through,but I could never indulge it except as a recreation.I was not to be an artist,and I am rather glad that I was hindered,for I had even stronger in-clinations in other directions;and art,really noble art,requires the entire devotion of a lifetime.
I seldom thought seriously of becoming an author,although it seemed to me that anybody who had written a book would have a right to feel very proud.But I believed that a person must be exceedingly wise before presuming to attempt it:although now and then I thought I could feel ideas growing in my mind that it might be worth while to put into a book,--if I lived and studied until I was forty or fifty years old.
I wrote my little verses,to be sure,but that was nothing;they just grew.They were the same as breathing or singing.I could not help writing them,and I thought and dreamed a great many that were ever put on paper.They seemed to fly into my mind and away again,like birds with a carol through the air.It seemed strange to me that people should notice them,or should think my writing verses anything peculiar;for I supposed that they were in everybody's mind,just as they were in mine,and that anybody could write them who chose.
One day I heard a relative say to my mother,--"Keep what she writes till she grows up,and perhaps she will get money for it.I have heard of somebody who earned a thousand dollars by writing poetry."It sounded so absurd to me.Money for writing verses!One dollar would be as ridiculous as a thousand.I should as soon have thought of being paid for thinking!My mother,fortunately,was sensible enough never to flatter me or let me be flattered about my scribbling.It never was allowed to hinder any work Ihad to do.I crept away into a corner to write what came into my head,just as I ran away to play;and I looked upon it only as my most agreeable amusement,never thinking of preserving anything which did not of itself stay in my memory.This too was well,for the time did lot come when I could afford to look upon verse-writing as an occupation.Through my life,it has only been permitted to me as an aside from other more pressing employments.
Whether I should have written better verses had circumstances left me free to do what I chose,it is impossible now to know.
All my thoughts about my future sent me back to Aunt Hannah and my first infantile idea of being a teacher.I foresaw that Ishould be that before I could be or do any thing else.It had been impressed upon me that I must make myself useful in the world,and certainly one could be useful who could "keep school"as Aunt Hannah did.I did not see anything else for a girl to do who wanted to use her brains as well as her hands.So the plan of preparing myself to be a teacher gradually and almost uncon-sciously shaped itself in my mind as the only practicable one.Icould earn my living in that way,--all-important consideration.
I liked the thought of self-support,but I would have chosen some artistic or beautiful work if I could.I had no especial aptitude for teaching,and no absorbing wish to be a teacher,but it seemed to me that I might succeed if I tried.What I did like about it was that one must know something first.I must acquire knowledge before I could impart it,and that was just what Iwanted.I could be a student,wherever I was and whatever else Ihad to be or do,and I would!
I knew I should write;I could not help doing that,for my hand seemed instinctively to move towards pen and paper in moments of leisure.But to write anything worth while,I must have mental cultivation;so,in preparing myself to teach,I could also be preparing myself to write.
This was the plan that indefinitely shaped itself in my mind as Ireturned to my work in the spinning-room,and which I followed out,not without many breaks and hindrances and neglects,during the next six or seven years,--to learn all I could,so that Ishould be fit to teach or to write,as the way opened.And it turned out that fifteen or twenty of my best years were given to teaching.
